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Hector
and Marco, while developing innovative packaging
solutions for
easypak™’s
customers, identified in many of them a strong desire to
use environmentally friendly and humanly healthy
materials (i.e. organic foods). This market-driven
desire coupled with Hector and Marco’s personal
convictions drove them to look for eco-friendly
alternatives within the realm of plastics.
The
first thought that came to their minds was that other
packaging materials such as aluminum and paper had
achieved a successful recycling track-record. Why not so
plastics? The answer lies in the nature of the
materials, in their cost, and in the players of each
particular field. Aluminum scraps can be mixed and
melted together to generate a high-grade marketable
aluminum ingot. Aluminum is also dense (hence cheap to
transport relative to other low-density materials) and
has a high value per pound. Papers of different types
can be mixed and processed together to produce a readily
useable and marketable pulp. The paper industry is
mature and there are many paper mills disseminated
across the US that can process recycled paper.
Additionally, once bailed, paper has a significant
density. Plastic is different. There are many
types of plastic materials and most are not compatible
with the rest; hence they have to be sorted to be
recycled. This sorting process is very labor intensive
and hence costly. Furthermore, recycled plastic
materials are not easily transformed into finished
products because of the nature of the plastic
transformation processes which are very sensitive to
impurities present in the materials processed.
Additionally, plastic packaging cannot be easily
compacted for cheap transportation from the point of
collection to the point of recycle: it is difficult to
compact and bail a bundle of empty plastic bottles or
clamshells. To make things even more difficult, since
plastics is a relatively young industry (at least
compared to aluminum and paper), there aren’t many
facilities nationwide to reprocess recycled plastics.
This said, though, the number
of companies handling and reclaiming post-consumer
plastics in 1999 (1,677) was nearly six times greater
than in 1986 (310).
The
previously mentioned characteristics of plastic
materials have been conducive to low market prices
for recycled plastics, which has dis-incentivized
potential entrepreneurs from entering the plastics
recycling business; consequently, plastics have not been
as successfully recycled as other materials. The average
recycling rate for all plastics in the US is under 10%.
This situation though is changing rapidly driven by
consumer and trade demand of environmentally friendly
packaging and by the dramatic raise in the price of
hydrocarbons-oil and gas.
In the
world of plastic materials, PET stands out
because it has characteristics that (in spite of what
was just explained above) favor its collection
-post-consumer use-and recycling. What are those
characteristics? PET is one of the most used plastic
resins in the world-mostly to manufacture bottles (sodas
and water) and fibers (polyester and fleece). PET
bottles and PET fibers are easily identifiable because
of their nature, which makes their collection and
selection feasible. The wide-spread use of PET bottles
and the ease of collecting and sorting them have spurred
the birth of several collection and recycling centers
across the US.
In those centers, post-consumer PET packaging can be
sorted, cleaned, and ground in flakes which are ready to
be reused in several PET transformation processes. Also,
in extreme cases, PET can be economically de-constituted
in its primary elements and re-constituted again to
generate a very pure PET indistinguishable from virgin
PET.
Serendipity played an important role in the birth of
ecopak™.
From its inception,
easypak™’s
major plastic raw material was PET which, unbeknownst to
Hector and Marco and as explained above, was also the
ideal plastic material for recycling
purposes:
ecopak™
was born. In mid 2005 the first experiments were
made at
easypak™
to process post-consumer recycled PET. By the end of
2005,
easypak™
was ready to use on a continuous basis post-consumer PET
in the production of packaging and in early 2006 the
first packaging products containing 50% or more recycled
PET were launched to the market-place. Presently,
easypak™
continues to experiment to attain a usage as close to
100% as possible of recycled post-consumer PET in the
fabrication of
ecopak™
packaging.
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